This was such a good book that I couldn’t stop reading it once I had started until I reached the end — despite getting a terrible headache from the non-stop reading. (Believe it or not, there is actually such a thing as “too much” reading, just as there can be “too much” TV — both can make your head hurt.) I can’t remember the last time I compulsively read a book all the way through that was not a run-of-the-mill mystery or thriller.

While Homecoming does actually involve a mystery, it is anything but run-of-the-mill — in fact, it is so well-written that after I read it non-stop the first time, I went back right away to re-read it. And since I now knew the answer to the mystery, I was able to read the book much more slowly the second time around and savor the brilliance of its writing.

The mystery itself is highly unusual, one that I have not come across before. An entire family — a mother and three of her four kids — are found dead near the creek on the grounds of their house – more of an estate, really, in a town near Adelaide in South Australia — where they had come to enjoy a picnic on a sweltering hot day. There was no sign of a struggle or an intruder or any kind of violence — in fact, they looked as if they were sleeping. That is what the man who found them thought — that they had just fallen asleep after their swim. It was only when he came closer to check on them did he find that they were not breathing. After he raised the alarm and the police arrived on the scene, they found something else that was confounding — the newborn baby girl of the family, who had also been at the picnic site in a basket hanging from a tree, was not there. She wasn’t found dead at least, so there was some hope that she was still alive, but she has disappeared.

Was it murder? But there are no suspects, no sign of violence. The most likely explanation is poisoning, but how, why, and by whom? Was it a murder-suicide? Was the mother depressed and killed herself and her children? And what about the baby? Has someone taken her? Or has she fallen prey to the wild dogs — dingoes — common in Australia?

Compounding the mystery is the fact that it happened all the way back in 1959, and while it has long since disappeared from public consciousness, it resurfaces in the year 2018 for the protagonist, Jess, who turns out to be related to the family that was found dead. Born and raised in Australia, Jess is a journalist who now lives in London, and she is summoned back to Sydney after her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Nora, suffers a serious fall and is hospitalized. It turns out that Nora is the sister-in-law of the woman who was found dead with her family in 1959. Not only that, Nora was actually visiting the family at that time and was there when it happened – she didn’t, however, go to the picnic with them, as she was heavily pregnant and due to give birth soon.

Jess had no knowledge of this tragedy at all prior to her return to Australia. But based on a few words that Nora happens to say while she is in a semi-conscious state at the hospital, Jess digs deeper and deeper and ultimately manages to find out not only what happened to the family who died but also to the baby girl who disappeared. It is a heartbreaking story involving three generations of her family, including her own mother, Polly, from whom she has been estranged for several years. The end of the book not only resolves the mystery of the deaths – and in a way that makes complete sense rather than requiring the reader to suspend their disbelief – but also bridges the distance between Jess and Polly in a very natural, heartwarming way.

Despite having a suspenseful murder mystery at its core, Homecoming is very much a novel that can be classified as “literary fiction,” with an evocative writing style that delves deeply into the thoughts and feelings of its characters and vividly describes many of the little details that make up the fabric of life – both in the past in 1959 as well as in the more contemporary time period of 2018. The pace of the book is leisurely, the focus being on the “here and now” rather than on “getting on with it.” The writing is not only beautiful but also full of philosophical musings and keen insights, and as I was reading it, I kept wanting to highlight so many passages from it that I eventually just bought my own copy of the book in order to do this and returned the one I had borrowed from the library.

Here are just a few examples.

This is when Jess is at Heathrow airport waiting to board the flight to Sydney:

She eventually joined the line at the final passport check for her flight, and then made her way into the glass-walled waiting room. She preferred it here. Unlike the departure hall, which was no-man’s-land masquerading as your local shopping mall … the boarding gate didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was: a holding room for human beings who were only going in one direction from here.

This is after she has landed in Sydney and has just arrived at Nora’s home:

Tea and toast were the rule after long-haul flying. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, that a person could be fed continuously over the course of a twenty-four-hour transit only to arrive at her destination ravenous. Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.

This is when she arrives at the hospital to see Nora:

The doctor might think Nora wasn’t ready to leave the hospital, but Jess knew otherwise. Nora needed to be back in her Pimpernel-papered room with its bed beneath the window. She liked to say that the view from her bedroom was all the religion she needed. “I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden,” she’d declare. “To be able to leave even a small patch of this earth more beautiful and bountiful than it was when one arrived.”

Here is a passage from 1959 at the picnic site where the family has died but has yet to be discovered:

Not far from the picnic blanket, a colony of ants continued to build their mound: diligent, resourceful, ever busy. They would realize, at some point, that a great boon of crumbs awaited them nearby, and set out to retreat them. They were at once a vital part, and yet separate from, the human story unfolding on the blanket beside them, their quest for survival no more or less important in nature ‘s eyes than that of any other creature on that blistering afternoon.

And finally, here are a couple from Polly’s point of view:

Beneath the painting was a Victorian high chair she’d bought when Jess was small and never been able to bring herself to give away. Polly liked the way old things looked. She found their small signs of damage reassuring: the scratches, the imprints from long-ago pens, the flaking paint. They understood that everybody had their bruised edges and private pasts.

A little further down, in reference to Polly’s estrangement from Jess:

Beer in hand, she wandered the narrow paths within the dense garden. She had planted it herself. There’d been nothing but long grass and a rusted car body when she moved into the house 30 odd years ago. It surprised Polly sometimes how willing things were to grow. The roses in the old claw-footed bathtub were doing very well this year. They shouldn’t be doing well, not in this climate, but Polly had always had luck with roses. It seemed she was better at raising plants than people.

I could go on and on, but I need to stop writing this post. I would just like to say, in conclusion, that a book like Homecoming shows how magnificent a good book can be and reaffirms why I fell in love with reading in the first place. Kate Morton is an amazing talent, and I am so happy to have discovered her writing.

Homecoming
Author: Kate Morton
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publication Date: April 2023

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Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.